PinMeTorevenue, valuation & funding

hello everyone my guest today is daniel melkerson he's building a company called pin me too it's a technology designed only for the needs of multi-location brands and organizations to connect and take control over digital brand experience which means boosting brand engagement driving foot traffic and achieving real results daniel you're ready to take us to the top yeah sure all right very good so tell us what the company does and are you pure place ass yes we are pure play sas company and what we do you explained it very very well so we help multi-location businesses could be our focused verticals is retail hotels uh restaurants but it needs to be a chain so it needs to have multiple locations look in locations uh awfully national or globally so what we do is that we help them for if someone searches for them online for example we make sure that they are if you search for a restaurant in los angeles we make sure our customers restaurants concepts in the search results before the their competitors interests our aim and goal with the company and also what we do is that we have a toolkit so and as i said all our customers are multilocation brand so if you're a multi-location brand for example you you if you have a hundred or a thousand locations all over the world then you will have uh customers coming to you online making reviews they try to connect to you and ask questions and they do that for every single location and that is often really really hard for the one especially if you're like a restaurant you have some people running that restaurant and they don't have time or the skills to handle reviews or talk to answer comments on facebook or other social media so we built a tool for i think that's the head office to handle that yeah i think i think that product makes sense to walk me through all people pay so on average what's a brand going to pay you per month to use the technology oh in average uh the average customer is around 800 u.s okay and what does that mean in terms of how many locations are they typically covering oh i always say our median customer has 120 locations but we have customers in between 40 locations up to thousands a couple of thousand locations 40 to a couple thousands yeah okay interesting that makes good sense and then what i mean so are you employing a sales model that is more like an enterprise sale or mid-market or an smb yeah with more more enterprise because a chain is never a small business yeah it's a clean business it's always large too and very good so what year do you launch the company uh we well we launched this the product in the company in the beginning of 2015 but we launched the company in 2013 and i think we got the story that is quite different from others we just had a team where i have developers we were friends so let's start a business and see what we do so so we did quite a dif different things in the beginning but we launched this product uh in the beginning of 2015. okay very good so 2013 and 2015 and how many customers have you scaled to today well about 200 okay 200. and then have you decided to bootstrap the company or did you or did you guys decide to raise we decided to race that's also another thing i i've built companies before uh organically and and this time i just wanted to see how the vc world works so there was a decision from the beginning to raise money yes how much have you raised and we have raised so far about 3.7 million us three seven okay and was most that equity or debt it's only equity it's all equity okay that's good and then i mean can i take 200 customers time i mean you listen so you know i was going to do this right 200 customers times 800 bucks a month you're doing about 160 000 a month right now in revenue yeah and where were you a year ago uh we have doubled since last year so half a little bit more yeah half that where did daniel where'd most that growth come from kind of new customers or driving expansion revenue on historical customers new customers we actually started up sales and or we did some trials with dubsteps last year where we started this this year so absolutely mostly from you customers yes and where are you finding them walk me through kind of your growth channels today uh you mean finding new customers yeah where are you finding new customers oh it's a swedish company as i i think i don't know if you talked about it before but so our our core markets in the scandinavia but we also have an inside sales organization that is built up for sales developers and sales managers and so on and we good where we go out globally in different verticals so it's both from head office with inside sales but also with field sales offices in and all the scandinavian capitals and also in poland thailand interesting wait you said poland thailand yeah so poland scandinavia and thai and thailand yeah interesting okay that sounds like you just wanted to open in thailand so you had an excuse to go to bali every once in a while ah no it's but i i it's opportunity based we knew good people that actually could start it and run it in thailand so what are you i mean field sales is tricky at a 800 per month price point average that's 10 grand a month there's not a lot of margin there to pay the salesperson commission pay for fights etc what's your fully weighted customer acquisition cost on a ten thousand dollar of your account oh wow oh let me see where do i have that uh and probably under cac yeah cac is uh 8 600 okay us okay and that's for a ten thousand dollar a year account uh no yeah it's it's uh it's a it's about that uh it's uh yeah about 10 000. okay so you have about 11 or 12 month payback period yeah 12.9 to be exact right now okay interesting and it sounds like you are now flirting with driving a system to drive expansion revenue on older cohorts so let's dive into that now what is your expense of the customers who signed up exactly one year ago um what did you expand that customer base by or in terms of the revenue they paid uh so far i would say 15 to 20 okay and how much of the revenue from that same core churned over the past 12 months oh we had very little shown it's under three percent per year okay so three percent revenue churn annually 20 expansion will put you at net revenue retention of about 117 percent annually does that sound right yeah that sounds right yeah pretty healthy what's the team look like today how many people uh we're 45 but we were like 25 six to eight months ago so we started the scaling okay very good company so 45 folks and where are most the hires are they sales people engineers customer success uh it's we hired a lot in all of them lately but we are scaling mostly within sales now okay very good and then i assume you're burning capital because of how much you've raised is that right yeah we burned since october last year but 10 months before that we actually were cash positive for 10 months oh great so i mean when you say i had some time to figure things out so when you say burning are we talking like 10 grand a month or 100 grand a month about how much are you burning monthly uh under 100 under 100 okay fair enough so you have i mean what does that give you like more than 18 months of runway yeah when do you think you'd raise again are you are you raising now uh we're not racing now but probably during spring okay and and if you raise in the spring why would that be the right time to raise uh we have good momentum now and also the investors we have on board uh are also want us to scale faster so i think there's also an opportunity in the market for us do you know how much you would target to raise at least uh no i i i don't feel comfortable talking about that already because it's it's a bit we haven't made the decision yeah yeah i think that makes sense i mean if you've already raised 3.7 i mean you've got to be thinking obviously in the millions right three four five million something like that yeah yeah absolutely i don't like to you know when i don't like to say i want to say an exact number since i don't have it but yeah you're within that yeah that's cool very good um okay uh let me see here let's uh let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh the latest i read was uh scaling up mastering the rockefeller habits by bernhanisch that's a good one i like that one purple number two is there a ceo you're following or studying not really i follow gary vaynerchuk but that's more like because i like him like his style and his yeah number three what's your funny what's your favorite online tool for building your company oh wow i would say within sales pipedrive uh for customer success plan hat that's the two i work mostly with number four how many hours of sleep to get every night six to eight and what's your situation married single kids married two kids that's good and how are you i'm 43 43 last question daniel what do you wish your 20 year old self knew i would say listen more talk less ask questions guys pin me to helping folks manage better manage individual locations especially big restaurant chains or places with a lot of physical locations over 200 customers today each customer paying more than 800 per month so 160 000 per month right now in revenue that's double year every year from 80 000 a month just a year ago they're burning less than 100 grand per month right now in terms of again net burn they've raised 3.7 million team of 45 people churning three percent of their customer revenue annually but expanding that same court 20 percent so 117 percent net revenue retention with about a 12 month payback period in terms of cac uh divided into again first year ac v daniel thank you for taking us to the top thank you so much thank you